This tells us very little because every society can be viewed as "contextual" in that sense, and pre-modern societies only more so. Consider the history of religious controversy in Britain, or the medieval remnants in the social structure of then-prerevolutionary France. What matters however is that the U.S. was intended to be far less contextual than its contemporary societies, a key advancement towards deeper modernity.
Oh yeah that's definitely what I mean. Every society at the bottom of it is "might makes right", and then they can be judged by what they do when they obtain a monopoly on might. And at least some of the time, the US used that might to stick up for the rights of people many others wouldn't. But also we drove Native Americans from their homes in a super brutal fashion, practiced one of the most violent forms of slavery in history, etc.
And I assume people of the future will look back on us and recoil at some perfectly regular things we do now, like work in coal mines, use air conditioning, eat meat, put kids in schools, whatever. We exist in this context too. All humans everywhere fail, but I think it's what we aspire to that defines us.
And so I think the jury is still out on the US. I think it's not even really clear what we aspire to at this point--it maybe was in 1789 but that context is gone. In this new context, what is it we stand for? We need to have that conversation as a society. I think it's worth pointing out that we're ultra bad at it, but maybe if we reify this concept, we can start getting better at it.
All of this was contextual. You could speak your beliefs freely as long as they were some kind of Christianity, nobody could force you to do anything unless you weren't a straight cis white man, etc.
For a long time our society was dominated by people for whom this was true, then suddenly all kinds of different people started having a voice:
- atheists and other non-Christians
- communists / marxists / anarchists
- women, people of color, LGBTQ people
And our society--predictably and not unlike many others--did a big "whoooooa no thank you" and people were imprisoned, beaten, murdered, disenfranchised, etc.
Or another way of putting it might be that when the Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution/Bill of Rights, humanity had just barely invented the swivel chair, polite gentlemen drank coffee out of saucers, and phrenology was a _future_ theory. Mythologizing those times does a disservice to us in these times; the Founders were just weird people like all of us, with the attendant blind spots and potential for greatness.